Level up – Building on others’ work, getting unstuck, and the future of product design

LessWrong.com’s best of page. They release a book every year with the 50 best posts.

• Knowledge – Grey stumbled upon this site by accident and immediately knew it was the kind you can get completely absorbed into. LessWrong.com is a non-profit that aims to improve human reasoning and decision-making. It has an extraordinary breadth of content (user-written posts and essays), thoughtful moderation, and great comment sections. Think Reddit, but focused and without the trolls.
• Psychology – We all experience different degrees of incivility throughout our daily lives. This podcast episode covers the negative effect of rudeness on our psyche, how to best protect ourselves from it (keeping high self-esteem), and how to improve our self-awareness to prevent harming others. The last part is crucial for leaders – getting honest feedback from reports can be especially difficult without making a significant (and genuine) effort to seek it out.
• Design – With the recent Figma controversy (a recent update added AI that produces fully fledged designs in minutes), there’s uncertainty about where design is going. A designer who started in 1998 shares his perspective on how design has changed, where the industry is now, and the skills necessary to stay competitive.
• Creativity – Finding sources of content, inspiration, and connection when creating can be challenging, especially for self-driven projects. Creating feedback loops by building on others’ work (”picking up what they put down”) is a great way to learn new things, build genuine rapport, and support creators by showing that you care.
• Psychology – In “Reality has a surprising amount of detail,” the author connects building physical projects with intellectual progress. They argue that ignoring how complex reality is can make us intellectually stuck, even at high levels of success in our field.
• AI – Landlords are banding together to raise prices, contributing to the housing affordability crisis and raising anti-trust questions. Companies like RealPage are at the center of the issue: they created a platform that lets landlords contribute their confidential data, and AI & algorithms fix rent prices. Algorithmic collusion like this is on the FTC’s radar, and some lawsuits are in motion to combat it, but the law seems woefully behind overall. Aside: It’s a tad weird that the audio version of the article uses an AI voice.
• Marketing – Whether recording your screen for training or showing off a product feature, having an easy-to-use, pleasant tool is helpful. Screen.studio handles automatic zoom, lets you record (and overlay) your webcam and microphone, and shows custom cursor movement and clicks. Another big plus is that you only pay once for a lifetime license.
• Legacy Internet Fun – For those of you who might remember Xanga, Geocities, Homestar Runner, ebaumsworld, and other early internet fun, some nostalgic sites have crept up this past month. Apparently, YTMND (you’re the man now dog) has returned, and Angela’s favorite “ninja works it” has been preserved (18+ years later!). While attending a farm dinner with an earth and natural materials ceramicist, we chatted and found a common link in our experiences with StumbleUpon. This browser extension would let you randomly explore the internet. We reminisced about how explorative that tool was and were able to link to a modern, similar concept by Kagi Search, Kagi Small Web.